Sports of The Times; Medium Egos in XL Game

By DAVE ANDERSON

Published: February 5, 2006

THE two club owners in Super Bowl XL are so different.

Dan Rooney is a throwback to pro football's old world, a Pittsburgh guy with no pretensions and the proud proprietor of the family franchise that his father, the legendary Art Rooney, bought for $2,500 in 1933 after a prosperous afternoon at Saratoga when he bet several long shots that came in.

Paul Allen is a multibillionaire, a co-founder of Microsoft with a stake in more than 50 companies, a philanthropist and a guitar player in a rock band who bought the Seahawks for $194 million in 1997 to keep them in his hometown, Seattle, after rallying the public vote for its dazzling new stadium.

They are so different and yet they were so alike in similar decisions that turned their teams toward the road to today's Ford Field showdown.

When the Steelers skidded to a 6-10 record in 2003, another owner might have decided that Coach Bill Cowher wasn't getting the job done anymore, that it was time to go in another direction, but Dan Rooney not only never blinked, he extended Cowher's contract. Since then the Steelers have gone 30-7, including the postseason.

''Bill's a good coach, a good person,'' Rooney said Thursday at the Steelers' hotel. ''Everybody has a down year now and then.''

Cowher was 34, a virtually unknown linebackers coach at Kansas City, when Rooney hired him in 1992 as the Steelers' head coach.

''I was impressed with his knowledge and his enthusiasm,'' Rooney said. ''He had confidence he could do the job. Being from Pittsburgh also had a little to do with hiring him, too, because we had coaches in the past who didn't believe in Pittsburgh the way Bill and Chuck Noll do.''

Noll had coached the Steelers to four Super Bowl championships in six seasons from 1974 to 1979 when Cowher was growing up in Pittsburgh.

''Bill and Chuck thought Pittsburgh was a special place,'' Rooney said. ''Some of those other coaches we had didn't think Pittsburgh was too much.''

If you want to coach, play or work for the Steelers, you better think Pittsburgh is special because the Rooneys have always thought it is special.

''The biggest thing my father passed on to me is to treat people right,'' Rooney said. ''We treat our players as people, not just workers. We're concerned for them away from the field and whatever problems they might have. My father always had a relationship with the players, and I've tried to do the same.''

At the Steelers' media session Thursday, Dan Rooney could have hung out where Cowher or Jerome Bettis or Ben Roethlisberger were answering questions. Instead, he was sitting with two backup linebackers and a practice-squad linebacker at an otherwise empty table ignored by some 200 reporters and camera crews.

That's where Art Rooney would have sat, with three people -- that's people, not workers -- who might not have been important to the reporters but were important to him because they were Steeler players. Don't think the players didn't notice that.

Paul Allen was not around the Seahawks' media sessions, but that was understandable. When you're worth, according to Forbes magazine, $21 billion, and you're involved in so many different businesses and causes, you exist in a different world. You travel with your own security people. You arrive in one of your several jets. And even though you're not around the team on a daily basis, as Rooney is, you don't deviate from your proven philosophy.

''Put the right people in place,'' Allen said Friday in a telephone interview, ''and ask the tough questions.''

Even when Mike Holmgren, who had guided the Green Bay Packers to a Super Bowl split before joining the Seahawks in 1999, thought a year ago that he might be fired after six seasons that produced only two wild-card playoff losses, Allen, as Rooney with Cowher, never considered a coaching change.

''It never crossed my mind not to have Mike continue as the head coach,'' Allen said.

But at a meeting with Holmgren at Allen's home, Allen asked the tough questions that prompted the hiring of Tim Ruskell as president of football operations. Holmgren had struggled to coexist with Bob Whitsitt, a pro basketball executive brought in earlier from the Portland Trail Blazers, a team Allen also owns. But with Whitsitt gone, Holmgren and Ruskell, who had helped build the Tampa Bay Buccaneers into the Super Bowl XXXVII champions, were operating on the same wavelength.

''The N.B.A. is more of a free-flowing game,'' Allen said. ''The N.F.L. is much more specialized. You need the right coaches and the right players, and team chemistry is so important.''

Allen grew up with what he described as a ''passion for football,'' going to college games in Seattle at Husky Stadium at the University of Washington, where his father was the associate director of the library. He remembered a quarterback with an unforgettable name, Sonny Sixkiller, and a longtime coach, Jim Owens. As a Washington State student, Allen was a center on a flag football team. And now he's one of pro football's 32 owners.

''Paul Allen has been a good addition to the league,'' Dan Rooney said. ''He's a busy guy so he doesn't always come to the owners meetings, but when he does, he doesn't say much. New guys don't say much.''

To Dan Rooney, pro football's oldest club owner, at 73, since the recent death of the Giants co-owner Wellington Mara, all the other owners are ''new guys.'' But unlike other nouveau riche owners, like the Redskins' Daniel Snyder and the Cowboys' Jerry Jones, who burst into the N.F.L. slashing and burning, Paul Allen has quietly earned his Super Bowl XL suite. Art Rooney would like him.